70
James Joyce sat on my balcony with a rocket launcher and a cigar. He’s been there for three days, shooting any psychologist that happens to wander by. The bodies piled up on the sidewalk outside serve to deter any other psychologists from coming near.
Joyce is pissed
James Joyce never liked psychology. He told me it had an emptiness to it he didn’t find present in books. And as James Joyce loaded up the rocket launcher for a seventh time, I spoke:
“I’m going to go move the bodies.”
“Don’t,” Joyce said, “The bodies will serve as a warning. I’m tired of those fuckers coming around here. Everyone knows that artists attract psychologists. Bloodsuckers.”
Joyce ended the conversation by putting on his headphones and blasting Ludacris.
71
My brain is a spaceship, and the goddamn spaceship is going to crash.
I have no idea where the pilot is.The engineer is running down the hallways, screaming that we’re all going to die. The chief security officer has the defenses running on full blast despite the fact there’s no discernible danger. He’s injured several of the passengers with his automatic stun gun system. The doctor left the medical bay mid-surgery to attempt to fly the ship. Where is the pilot? Nobody can find him, and they’ve forgotten who it is anyway. The whole cre wthinks they’re pilots, because they’ve all got different course operatives and flight patterns that they all believe are top priorities. And they think the only way their operatives are going to be fulfilled is by grabbing the wheel and veering onto a new course.
Violence is built into the mainframe of this ship’s core. We have yet to figure out how to remove this as it seems to be a primary function for the ship’s stability.
72
He lived in a cabin about twenty miles from the city, built of redwood and frozen ash. He built the windows as circles instead of squares, because circles were pure, because circles was the best way to get the light in.
He was a self-proclaimed ascetic, because he’d sworn off women and money and living in the city. He hadn’t been to a bar in twenty-five years, not since the night he saw that man with the prosthetic limb thrown through the window of the dive, blood like an upside down smile on his chin, his teeth kicked through his lips. Although he still enjoyed making coffee over the stove, and the feeling of grass underneath his feet, and dressing game, and sitting on the porch imagining the moon squeezed between his thumbs.
The kik-kik-kik of the locusts as they sang.
He had violent dreams in which the noise of the locusts turns into the rhythmic pounding of a man’s fist on a table in front of him. So kik-kik-kik became SLAM-SLAM-SLAM. He often woke with the noise reverberating through his skull, and he could only be calmed by going to the circular window and waiting for the sun to rise.
He drank water from his cupped hands, the half-circle, counting the number of seconds from when he lifted his hands to when he swallowed.
The dreams became violent when a coyote yowled for six straight nights out on the hills beyond the cabin. The howl became one long suffocating scream and for the first time in years he saw the man’s face, like a slashed tire, come into focus in his dream as if it’d been lifted out of the fog, out of focus all those years. And it was the face of a ghoul, contorted, busted lip, blind-soaked with darkness cutting his eyes in half. And if he looked long enough at the face in his dreams, the man reached for his own eyes and pressed his thumbs into his eye sockets, puncturing them, open mouth twisted.
Ooooooooooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
The man could not be calmed by the window, or the rhythmic rubbing of his thumbs as he boiled coffee on the stove. He took his hunting rifle and set out into the night, to the hills beyond the trees. He had not been here in years, because up here he could see the top of the town, the buildings frosted over. The air seethed around the town, stretched, nearly paralysed his hands.
If he could go back, he would never have looked. He has thought about this for several years, especially when his daughter told him “You can’t run from your fears,” as she bounced a child on her lap, juggling coffee and a baby bottle and rolling her eyes whenever her husband said he couldn’t find his keys.
So he took his gun and his car and his hunting supplies, and said, “Watch me.”
Watch me.
Out on the hills he picked out the house he used to live in. He didn’t want to, but did it instinctively, finding the one with the rusted red roof and the willow tree bent underneath the weight of the bells on strings his daughter tied to each limb. Fairy bells, she said, so we know when they’re here.
He turned away from the town and it ached on his back. He carried it with him as he hunted. He followed the howls of the coyote and found it scratched earth, tiny. He only needed to shoot once to get the shot. He killed the coyote. Smaller than he imagined, with a red tuft of fur around its chin, like a beard. He dressed the coyote on the field.
He ate the coyote at home, while waiting for sunlight to come through the window. He wracked himself with dreams.
Note: This is part of my Psycho-Surreal Memoirs Series. You can find more by looking through my feed. They're designed to be able to be read in any order.
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